This Year's Last Hurrah

The greens are ready to pick. According to my last blog entry, I planted them about a month ago. We have plenty of mustard, turnip, kale, and lettuce. Sarah took home two sacks full on Monday. This barely made a dent in them. Come Saturday, I'll be picking greens for the freezer. Wish you lived close enough to help! ;)

The spinach is being persnickety and has come up thinly. Same goes for the beets. Right now, there's enough spinach for a couple of small salads from the baby leaves, but not enough to sautee. We intend to make a plastic tent for all of the greens, hoping to extend their growth into winter. I should go to Home Depot for plastic tomorrow, so that Jack Frost won't catch me unprepared.




This afternoon, I picked the first green beans from the "new crop." (We planted those two months ago.) I went to the garden hoping to find enough for supper, and came out with 2 gallons of beans. They'll need picking again by the weekend. After skimming a couple of handfulls off the top for our dinner, I gave the rest to a cousin up the road. Mine are now slowly steaming in garlic butter, to go with the potatoes and the pork loin that are roasting in the oven.

The sweet peas, planted two months ago, have nice, big pods on them, but they're not filled out yet. I can hardly wait for those!

Back in the summer, I found two scraggly brussels sprouts plants at a garden center, and stuck them in the ground. It was way too late to plant brussels sprouts, and they just sat there, doing nothing, during the hot part of the summer. Last month, I noticed that they had begun to grow, and I thought we might get a little crop of sprouts, after all. Today, I noticed that they are now green skeletons, thanks to some cute little green/black striped worms that have helped themselves to the leaves. I'm going to leave them - and the worms - alone to see what happens.

It's too bad that there aren't more resources for fall gardening around here, because gardening at this time of the year can be so pleasant. It's not too hot or too cold. The bugs (except for those pesky brussels sprouts worms) aren't too bad, so there's no need for pesticides. How nice it feels to eat vegetables that are fresh and crisp and, except for maybe a little bug poo, clean enough to eat while standing right there in the garden.

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